Search form

BikeShopHub

BikeShopHub.com was founded in 2006 in Flagstaff, Arizona. Originally founded as BikeTrailerShop.com, they got our start by intensely focusing on the niche of bike cargo trailers, selling a broad range of bike cargo trailer as well as parts and accessories for them. With 4 niche sites underway, BikeShopHub.com began to emerge as the ecommerce leader in bike commuting, bike touring and family cycling gear. In 2013 the company relocated to Tucson, AZ into a 7000 square foot facility to support their continued growth.

"My name is Frank Koenen. I work for Bike Shop Hub in Arizona. We sell retail bicycle accessories, and I'm a software developer for that company and support the infrastructure for eCommerce sales and all of the logistics involved in doing online sales.

Primarily our offices run on Macintosh desktops, some Windows systems, but mostly we are using Mac, and then our enterprise systems are running Linux.

Open source was part of our decision; we based all of our infrastructure on open source solutions and found great value in them. At the time that we decided to go with xTuple, we were in a situation where the company had grown to a point of using the current accounting system lacked our volume practically. We were pushing it to the limits, and we needed to get something much more scalable and much more capable for the size of the business we were at and where we were heading.

The first four year at the company -- at least -- it's been run on QuickBooks, and again we exceeded the capabilities of it, plus we were experiencing a lot of gaps in our system that we couldn't automate very well. So, we did a lot of export data from QuickBooks and tried to import into other systems, and it was just a nightmare. As volume increased that just became unworkable. We needed something that, first off, could handle the mass of information that we were going to put at it, plus a way in which we could fluidly get to the data.

The difference that we saw with PostBooks and xTuple, the fact that xTuple had a commercial backing on it was encouraging to us, because for us to grow we wanted to have something that was supportable and just clean to start with, and we didn't want to pick up problems. We wanted to take what was good and make it better.

Right off the bat one of the problems we did have in overall running of e-commerce retail business was Cost of Goods Sold, actually. We were already seeing issues with it when we were using QuickBooks. We move so much volume and we have such a variety of product that it was difficult for to determine what our profit margins were in our cost of selling these products. So right out of the gates we were able to get that information much quicker and more readily and have already shifted some of our discount models, for example. You were getting a great bargain a couple months ago. You can still get a great bargain, but it's a little more economical for the company as well, and xTuple helped us see that, so it definitely did pay off."